


You Close Your Eyes and the Glory Fades

by KallanEboi



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Colorblindness, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-05
Updated: 2013-05-05
Packaged: 2017-12-10 11:58:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/785808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KallanEboi/pseuds/KallanEboi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His body isn’t his own, he knows that, knew before the procedure that everything would change. That was the easiest thing to wrap his head around, actually, the physical changes. He’s used to his body betraying him, so this is just another thing to learn his way around. But the colors of everything, even the sliver of blue sky he could see, craning his head at the tiny window, look different.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Close Your Eyes and the Glory Fades

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to Copperbadge and Mageflower for the beta (and for tolerating my flailing).

_Then_

Pain. 

Pain is all he can feel. The injections are like hot wires stabbing into his skin. He can’t help it. He screams. It’s worse than the time he broke his arm, worse than any fight, worse than the asthma attacks he’d had all of his life, worse than all of them combined. 

Then it stops and the doors open and he very nearly falls on his face.

Cool air, dank from being underground is the first thing he registers. Dim lights, so dark after the lights in the machine, and Howard catches him. Only Howard has shrunk. It’s an hysterical thought before he realizes it’s him. _He’s_ the one that’s grown. 

And then Peggy’s there. She’s shorter that he is now, too, and her lips are so bright. Red. Red in a world of yellows and greens and browns, colors that weren’t what they were before he’d gone in, and oh god that’s red and yellow and green (red lips, yellow lights, military green) and Peggy’s lips are red. Not the bright red lipstick she’d wear later, but still, the first red he’d seen, the vibrant color he’d read it was, that was bright like fire. The color takes a moment to register, becoming more vivid even as he stares, as the Serum finishes taking hold. Red. They’d always been red, he realizes, it’s just that he’d never been able to see it. 

There’s a click and an explosion and a bright bloom of fire (red and yellow and oh, that’s orange) and then gunshots and red again, a different red, heart’s blood red, on Dr. Erskine. 

The headlong chase through New York is dazzling. Sounds are clearer, smells sharper, and he can feel the rough pavement beneath his feet, the sharp glass from the storefront window he crashes through, but the colors. Yellow taxis and red stoplights and oranges blues greens purples...so many and so vibrant and varied it almost seems like too much. 

Later, when he’s finally (mercifully) alone, he sits and stares out of the window, relearning the world. His body isn’t his own, he knows that, knew before the procedure that everything would change. That was the easiest thing to wrap his head around, actually, the physical changes. He’s used to his body betraying him, so this is just another thing to learn his way around. But the colors of everything, even the sliver of blue sky he could see, craning his head at the tiny window, look different. 

Red and green had always been the colors he couldn't see properly. The doctors pronounced him "colorblind" when he was young, which was a term he’d never liked. He could still see some colors, and so it hadn’t really seemed accurate. But now blues seem deeper, yellows more powerful. And red. Well, red quickly becomes his favorite color.

This is especially true after Peggy wears that red dress.

“Penny for your thoughts, soldier,” Peggy says to him a few days later. He’s sitting next a campfire, a notebook and grease pencil in his hands, shield propped next to him. He looks up at her, startled, and smiles.

“That’s almost how you looked the first time I saw you,” he says.

“Beg pardon?” she replies, sitting next to him, close enough that if he shifted even slightly to his left they’d be touching. It’s a small bench, hastily constructed out of two rocks and a spare board someone had found, so their closeness could be overlooked.

“The first time I saw you, I was eye level with your nose,” he says, looking back at the fire.

“Ah,” she says. 

“The world looks different now. I mean, I’m taller,” he says, and immediately grimaces. The Serum definitely hadn’t fixed his inability to talk to women. 

“Well, yes, we knew that Dr. Erskine’s serum would affect your height.”

“When you’re growing up, you don’t notice things getting smaller,” Steve says. “I mean, you can measure it out on a door frame or by not needing a stool to reach the top shelf of the bookcase anymore, but it’s gradual. I grew a foot in the space of two minutes.” He pauses, looks at the fire for a moment, one hand drifting across his shield. “I had to relearn how everything looked. How everyone looked. I can look _down_ at Bucky. I’ve looked up at him my whole life. Now...” he trails off, thumb running over the edge of his shield, making the metal hum faintly, “everything’s different.”

“It’s not just that,” Peggy says, and Steve looks over at her. “I read your file. Asthma, scoliosis, heart murmur. The serum fixed all of that.”

“Among other things,” Steve replies. 

“The doctors tested you for everything,” Peggy says, confused.

“They forgot the colorblindness,” Steve replies, and he hears Peggy inhale sharply. “They were more concerned with getting blood samples, I guess, or they didn’t think it was important.” His fingers tap out a staccato rhythm on the outside red circle on the shield. 

“I can have a word, have your vision tested,” she offers.

He shakes his head. “No. It just threw me.” 

“Hey, Steve!” someone yells, and he turns to see Bucky waving at him. “New orders’re in, let’s go!”

“Be careful,” Peggy says.

Steve smiles, eyes on the red of her lips, the pink of her cheeks. “Always am, ma’am," he replies, settling his shield on his arm and turning away. 

_Now_

Iron Man is red. An ostentatious red, one that doesn’t even try for stealth or camouflage. “Look at me!” it screams.

It fits Tony Stark perfectly.

Flashy, he’s flashy in the suit or out of it, but in very different ways. In the suit, it’s a power play, a fearless assault on your senses. Out of the suit, he’s like a magician. Look at my right hand while my left hand quietly hacks a military database because you aren’t paying attention. 

Steve understands why the suit is red. It's so you see it coming.

After the fighting is over, Stark gives them all apartments in the Tower. It takes a while to fix all the damage, but his invitation is there almost before the paint has dried on the walls. 

Steve maybe goes a little crazy decorating his. Bright plush rugs on the floor, bright prints of paintings that he’d only ever seen before the Serum on the walls. A red quilt on his bed.

“Craving some color, were you, Cap?” Tony says the first time he comes to Steve’s apartment. 

Steve shrugs and turns back to his drawing. He’s experimenting with chalk pastels, working on a New York skyline from a postcard he’d picked up from a street vendor. There’s a laptop open next to the drawing, paused on a YouTube video of an artist in mid-stroke.

“That’s good,” Tony says, peering over Steve’s shoulder.

“Is it?” Steve asks, sitting back to try to take a look at the piece as a whole. “I’ve never really worked with color before.”

“Couldn’t get the supplies during the war?” Tony asks, and it doesn’t have the mocking edge that Steve expects, the one Tony usually has when he talks about how old Steve is.

“That and I wouldn't have known what to do with them even if I had them,” Steve replies distractedly, smudging a line with his little finger. Tony makes an inquiring noise, watching Steve work. “I had no training. Didn’t think it was worth it to learn. I was colorblind.”

“What?” Tony asks, incredulous.

“Colorblind. Is that not what it’s called--”

“No, that’s right,” Tony interrupts. “So the Serum...”

“Fixed it,” Steve finishes when Tony trails off. “I came out of that machine and saw red for the first time. Properly, I mean.” He smudges another line. “Peggy’s lipstick.” There’s the familiar ache, low in his chest, hollow now instead of sharp.

Tony is staring at him when he turns to look, looking at him like a piece of a puzzle had just fallen into place. “So that’s why all the...” Tony trails off again, waving an arm to indicate Steve’s apartment.

“Yeah,” Steve replies shortly.

“So, if you were colorblind, and then you were in the war,” Tony says slowly before he pauses, looking around. “Come on, we’re going to a museum.”

“What?” Steve asks, confused.

“There’s a Van Gogh exhibit at one of them, Bruce mentioned it last week. I’m taking you. Let’s go. Wash your hands, put on your shoes. I’m going to show you color. Pepper’s been lecturing me for years about art, it’s time I put some of that to good use.” 

Steve stares at him, still perplexed.

“Art, Rogers, come on. We’re in New York. There’s a million museums and galleries for you to gawk at. You’ll thank me later.”

Hours later, they're eating a late lunch at a small cafe in the museum. It's quiet, a weekday afternoon, so it's only them and a few other people. Steve ignores the little cameras and phones, taking his cue from Tony. 

They’ve been through most of the museum. They started at the top and worked their way down through all of the galleries and exhibits. Steve had stopped at every painting, studying them all, lingering over the ones he’d like best. Tony had been uncharacteristically quiet. Aloof, of course, pretending he wasn’t interested, always fiddling with his phone. But he’d never actually answered any phone calls and he’d offered interesting bits of trivia about the paintings to Steve from time to time. 

“Penny for your thoughts,” Tony says, surprising Steve. He hadn’t realized the phrase was still around, hadn’t heard it since that conversation with Peggy. He for a moment, discarding flippant answers. Tony wouldn’t have asked if he hadn’t wanted to know, not here, not today. 

“It's not what I expected,” he finally answers. Tony tilts his head, and Steve says, “when you’re little, and you’re learning your colors, someone says, ‘That’s red,’ and you accept it. Because it is. That’s what that color is to you. That’s red. That’s yellow, that’s blue, that’s green. It’s hard to see the differences, but that’s your world. You know that grass is green and strawberries are red because someone told you what those colors were. But then you wake up one day and none of those colors are what you thought they were.” He takes a deep breath, looks at Tony. “That’s what it was like for me. Someone had taken the world and changed all the rules.

“So, no, the paintings weren’t what I was expecting. You can see them in books, and I had. I’d studied them, studied the lines and values in them because that was what I worked with. So thank you,” Steve says, leaning back in his chair. “Thank you for bringing me here.”

The look Tony gives Steve is one he can’t decipher, but then Tony smiles, wide and easy. “Any time, Capsicle. We’ll get you a membership so you can come whenever you want to.”

Steve smiles, brightening. “You can do that?” he asks, and Tony laughs, not meanly. 

“Sure. No problem. Come on, I want to show you another one before we head back.”

They stop at an art supply store on the way back to Stark Tower.

The next time Tony walks into Steve’s apartment, Steve’s bent over his art table, so close his nose is nearly touching the paper. He doesn’t react to Tony’s presence, so Tony shuffles closer, trying to see what he’s working on so feverishly.

The picture is incomplete, but it’s already stunning. Worked on black paper, he’s sketched out a rough cityscape, so faint it’s almost ghostly, gray against the black. It’s not any city in particular, Tony thinks, but that’s not what’s caught his eye.

Hulk is a bright spot of green and purple, caught mid-roar, his fists buried in asphalt webbed with cracks. Natasha is nearly invisible, her red hair and pale skin the only colors giving away her position, but she’s unmistakable, bright highlights from a nearby street lamp glinting off of her guns. Clint’s dark purple uniform is half-colored on top of one of the buildings. Tony can’t see Thor, but there’s a red shape he assumes is a cape and a vague outline of what looks like Thor’s armor plates and Mjolnir done in the same grey as the buildings. The Iron Man armor is standing almost straight in midair, firing a repulsor down at Steve himself, bright blue Captain America uniform in stark relief against the background. His shield is raised to deflect the repulsor blast (a maneuver they’ve been working on) off the paper at an unseen enemy. The light from the repulsor is what illuminates the armor and Steve’s shield, turning the colors almost white with over-illumination. The whole picture is loose, the colors blinding against the black paper and grey buildings. 

Tony waits until Steve straightens before he coughs. Steve whirls, and Tony holds his hands up in surrender.

“Tony, what, why, what?” Steve stammers, looking from the picture to Tony and back. He sidles over, as if trying to hide the picture. 

“I knocked, no one answered, I assumed you were napping, I just wanted to drop off the latest files from SHIELD,” Tony says, not-so-subtly craning his neck to try to see around Steve. He holds out the files to Steve, who takes them and sets them aside, finally moving out of the way.

“I’m not finished,” Steve offers after Tony has had time to study the picture some more.

“It’s a good start,” Tony says. There’s something about the picture he can’t quite place. The colors are so _deliberate_. “It’s us,” he says finally, looking up at Steve.

“I thought you were a genius,” Steve replies.

“No, no, yeah, I am, but that picture, it’s about _us_. As a team. Our relationship with you. Working together, fighting, yes, but _as a team_ ,” Tony says.

“I lost everything, Tony,” Steve says. There’s no sadness in the words, no pity. Just stating a fact. “It was like coming out of that machine all over again. I had to learn to move, to see, to function again. And this,” he waves at the picture, “is you, all of you, helping me do that.” He runs a finger along the line of the repulsor blast, mixing the blue and white together. 

The silence stretches out as Steve turned back to the drawing, Tony watching.

“Iron Man’s taller than that,” Tony finally mutters, and Steve laughs. “He is!”

“Is not,” Steve replies, grinning at Tony. “I’ve got reference pictures to prove it.” He holds up a tablet, some press release photo of the pair of them standing next to each other, Steve in full Captain America regalia and Tony in the suit with the helmet off. 

“That’s a bad angle,” Tony insists, and Steve laughs again.

“Keep telling yourself that, Tony,” he replies. He sets his pastel down and stands up straight, stretching his arms over his head. “Greek food and movies?” he asks.

“Chinese and video games?” Tony counters.

“Greek and video games,” Steve says, and Tony shrugs. “Let’s go, I need to look at something else for a while.”

A few hours later, Steve thrashes everyone at Mortal Kombat.

**Author's Note:**

> This all came about because I saw in Steve's file in the Phase One box set that he was colorblind on top of all of his other health problems and grew from there.
> 
> I personally am not colorblind. I tried to do as much research as I could on it while I was writing. I apologize for any inaccuracies. 
> 
> There are several colorblind artists out there, and they do amazing work. This is just one example: http://www.colorblindartist.com/
> 
> (Title totally taken from Imagine Dragon's "Ready, Aim, Fire" off of the Iron Man 3 album.)


End file.
